Software automatic testing has become one of the important parts in the software development chain. After software developers have finished program codes, testers perform some basic functional testing. Meanwhile, testers develop some automation scripts to replace manual testing and save later testing cost.
The automation scripts define a serial of operations automatically performed on the application interface to verify results of these operations with a group of rules. In order to ensure a successful automatic test, maintenance to the automation scripts is very important. The automation scripts should be updated correspondingly once the application interface has been changed, so as to reflect the changes. Accordingly, testers must maintain the automation scripts frequently to ensure its usability and guarantee that it is the latest version.
Sometimes the maintenance to the automation scripts is very complex. Once there is a small change on the interface (for example, changes in texts), it is possible to cause abnormal operations in certain automation scripts. For example, an element (such as a button, a link, etc.) is usually determined by its texts in automation scripts for a network application. Under such a situation, if texts of the element are changed, then normal tests cannot be implemented because the automation scripts are unable to find the original texts in run time. During software development, it is necessary for developers to improve their products continuously, and it is necessary for testers to update their automation scripts accordingly, which brings serious burden to the testing work.